I am thinking of switching from my win xp to either Ubuntu or Linux Mint. I have heard pros and cons for both and was wondering whats better for gaming and searching the web. I have a very old 2004 build with a High tech Excaliber 9250 VGA graphics card. What works better for a Linux newbee. Heard Unity sucks but I think I can deal with it.

Edit: I use Firefox mostly and watch Nova, PBS programs and the news. I will not be playing anything other than homeworld 1 and 2, Sim City 4 Deluxe or Command and Conquer the first decade. I will not need to use MS Office or other windows specific programs that are unstable or unsupported by Linux. I wont be doing any work on this, brake from school. I basically need this dinosaur to hold me over for a few months until my next build. I am completely new to CLI but not afraid of it, just of me screwing something up.Specs: Celeron CPU 2.66 4/1/2004 driver 2 Gigs ram. cannot go higher High tech Excaliber 9250 VGA graphics card 140 G IDE HDD mobo-trying to find manufacturer, 2003 Its an old Compaq.

Last edited by RAMBO on Wed Aug 01, 2012 6:13 pm, edited 2 times in total.

As much as I love Linux, if running commercial PC games is part of your use case, you probably *don't* want to run Linux as your primary OS. Yes, there are a few commercial games that have native Linux ports, and some Windows games will run acceptably under Wine (or other forms of emulation); but gaming is not Linux's forte.

For general use (web, e-mail, etc.) I'd probably go with either Mint, or Kubuntu (the KDE flavor of Ubuntu).

I currently run Ubuntu 10.04 (the last Long Term Support version of Ubuntu that came out before the Unity switch and dropping of GNOME 2 support) both at home and work. Will probably be migrating to Kubuntu 12.04 LTS or Debian 6.0 soon. (And no, I would not recommend Debian for a newbie.)

just brew it! wrote:As much as I love Linux, if running commercial PC games is part of your use case, you probably *don't* want to run Linux as your primary OS. Yes, there are a few commercial games that have native Linux ports, and some Windows games will run acceptably under Wine (or other forms of emulation); but gaming is not Linux's forte.

For general use (web, e-mail, etc.) I'd probably go with either Mint, or Kubuntu (the KDE flavor of Ubuntu).

I was going to run just old games on this. Sim City 4 deluxe, command and conquer the first decade and homeworld 1 and 2. I wont be buying any new games until I do a new build next year. Should I still stay with windows xp for now?

Edit: I also don't know if these old games or my old graphics card would be OK with your suggestions. have found mixed results on google.Edit: Thanks for the heads up, sounds like Linux is more for work and out of my knowledge area so I will stick with xp unless you suggest otherwise.

Well, older games do have a better chance of being supported decently under Wine. But even if they are supported, they may not run as smoothly as they do natively on XP.

Edit (in reply to your edits): Support for older hardware in Linux is generally quite good; in fact, Linux often continues to support older hardware long after the hardware manufacturer has ceased providing driver updates. The main issue for games is that DirectX support on Linux had to be reverse engineered, with a translation layer to convert Direct3D to OpenGL (since Linux has no native Direct3D support). Wine is perpetually playing "catch up" with Microsoft's gaming APIs.

As long as you don't have a hard requirement for native Windows-only applications, Linux is quite capable (and in my opinion superior in many ways) for both personal and work use. Unfortunately, a *lot* of people need (or at least want strongly enough for it to be a sticking point) Windows-specific apps.

As an aside, if you're interested in learning about software development Linux is an excellent platform for that.

just brew it! wrote:Well, older games do have a better chance of being supported decently under Wine. But even if they are supported, they may not run as smoothly as they do natively on XP.

According to my experience: that statement has been true for a long time, but as the Wine 1.4 got released as stable, some really old games that I have tried like Diablo II expansion and Dune 2000 actually have better performance on my very old PC over here, than what it used to have on Windows XP that I used many years ago.

The dissapointment with Wine could be that not all old pc games do work correctly with Wine, and for that, I agree that running a native Windows XP system might be a better idea, for me I just avoid all games that do not work with Wine, no matter how good they are, but that's just me..

Firstly, I would recommend going with Mint. Ubuntu is a dead end, thank's to their own decisions regarding Unity.

With Mint you just have to download and burn the DVD, which also works as a full blown LiveCD with Firefox, Flash, LibreOffice, Thunderbird and VLC preinstalled already. This will give you a chance to test it out. With some performance implications though. I think you can even try to install Wine and some games from LiveCD if you have enough RAM.

For older games, Wine should be able to handle them just fine, if not, you can also run a VirtualBox XP inside Linux, which also supports some hardware acceleration.

And in worst case, you can install XP alongside Mint. Install XP on some 10% of the HDD, then install Mint as a second OS on the rest. You will be able to use Mint for everything, but if some app has problems, you can still reboot and use XP. This is how I do it, although I use 7, and I have to reboot to Windows very rarely nowadays.

Dual boot is something you want to plan for upfront though. But it works like a charm, and Linux is also capable to read and write to NTFS partitions nowadays. So data sharing is also a lot easier.

Moreover, it's a good time to start getting used to Linux, Windows seems to be taking a nosedive on desktop, it's better to be prepared.

Gaming: Ubuntu. EA, sort of, and Valve are going to make that their Linux distro of choice, and it has the most mindshare, which translates into more software pre-packaged for it.

Try Kubuntu or Xubuntu if you don't like Unity. Just keep in mind, Unity is the official DE for Ubuntu, and as such, it will get more love then the others.

Mint may work with EA and Valve, but it's not a guarantee.

Searching the web: Anything that runs a proper version of Firefox andor Chrome.Google and DuckDuckGo work fine regardless of the browser; Firefox and Chrome just more supported then others. Stuff plays better with Firefox then it does with Debian's Iceweasel, and Chrome will be necessary for Flash, if Flash doesn't die.

For a newbie, it really depends on what your goals are for Linux. If you just want something to replace Windows and you don't want to mess with stuff too much, Ubuntu is a good bet, and there is tons of stuff out there on how to fix problems. Try out Unity, and see if you like it. A lot of people have a lot of opinions about it, but it's easy enough to try it out since Ubuntu installs from a live disc.

Linux Mint is nice, but it remains to be seen if Cinnamon is going to go anywhere, or what the project is going to do in the future. Now that Ubuntu has started to ship previously forbidden codecs and drivers there isn't much reason to recommend Mint for anymore.

OpenSUSE with either Xfce or KDE is the best desktop experience in the Linux world right now. The downside is that it's very techy (They give you lots of knobs to twiddle.), and it doesn't have that big of a userbase (OpenSUSE is a distant fourth.).

I personally use Fedora with Xfce or Scientific Linux. I like server stuff, and Red Hat is the leader in that area.

Flatland_Spider wrote:Gaming: Ubuntu. EA, sort of, and Valve are going to make that their Linux distro of choice, and it has the most mindshare, which translates into more software pre-packaged for it.

Try Kubuntu or Xubuntu if you don't like Unity. Just keep in mind, Unity is the official DE for Ubuntu, and as such, it will get more love then the others.

Mint may work with EA and Valve, but it's not a guarantee.

Mint is very much like Ubuntu, the core stuff is the same, I think Ubuntu uses Debian as a base, and Mint uses Ubuntu as a base.

They both use deb packages, so anything from Ubuntu can be installed if I'm not mistaken. Moreover, since games are GUI independant for most part, DE shouldn't play a big role. Just like you can run Skype on Ubuntu, Kubuntu or anything else. In worst case whole GUI support libraries will be downloaded and installed as a deb package prerequisite.

Flatland_Spider wrote:For a newbie, it really depends on what your goals are for Linux. If you just want something to replace Windows and you don't want to mess with stuff too much, Ubuntu is a good bet, and there is tons of stuff out there on how to fix problems. Try out Unity, and see if you like it. A lot of people have a lot of opinions about it, but it's easy enough to try it out since Ubuntu installs from a live disc.

Mint is by far easier, it runs right after install, everything is there, video codecs, browsers, audio, everything. Ubuntu always involves at least two hours of tweaking.

For a newbie, it really depends on what your goals are for Linux. If you just want something to replace Windows and you don't want to mess with stuff too much, Ubuntu is a good bet, and there is tons of stuff out there on how to fix problems. Try out Unity, and see if you like it. A lot of people have a lot of opinions about it, but it's easy enough to try it out since Ubuntu installs from a live disc.

I think that in some cases, Ubuntu is not a good option for newbies, although it's mostly always recommended on different forums, even at Ubuntu.org that I myself have spent a lot of my time on (a bit over 4 years).

I would say that for starters, you need to, as the poster have written above, set your goals. You have a lot of time to save to read over at different websites for different Linux distributions before you make your choice. I would also say that distrowatch.com is a good place for you to get a sense on what options you got, and that you realize that Linux offers a lot of choice, all of it free as well. For me, the choice of your Linux distribution is a bit like food, some you enjoy and some you hate, as I do. And I would say, from personal experience, stay away from Ubuntu as much as you can if you really want to be serious about Linux and spend some real time understanding the major differences between the Windows operating system and a Linux operating system, even though much of it looks the same on the surface, it's under the hood that the more interesting parts are found.

I have found Ubuntu haters who have found their way to Linux, and going right back to their Windows operating system, and there can be many reasons because of this. One reason is because Canonical rushes their releases, which makes their Linux kernel which they ship with their Ubuntu systems a bit shaky once they have been released, even so called stable versions. It usually takes time for them to get some stability on them, and by Ubuntu there have been a history, dating at least 5 years back in time where distribution upgrades makes the graphics driver break, which causes you to have some serious knowledge on what's going on to be able to fix it. That never ever happens with a stable release such as Debian, in what I myself have experienced, needless to say that that isn't possible on Debian, only that I haven't been in that situation. The Linux kernels shipped with Debian are more tested before they are being shipped with a Linux distribution, but much testing creates a distribution with older software and Linux kernels which often stays behind in comparison to Ubuntu or Fedora. But that doesn't mean it's bad, and with a PC which don't have the latest in pc hardware, you wouldn't care too much about it, and the option of using backported software makes you being able to use more recent software, even on a Debian system, at your own risk (mostly painless...).

Last edited by khelben1979 on Wed Aug 01, 2012 4:14 pm, edited 1 time in total.

BobbinThreadbare wrote:Unity isn't nearly as bad as people make it out to be.

If you're forced to use it, and have no other choice, yes, it's not that bad, you can bear it. But it's a real trainwreck.

Full disclosure: my only experience with it is on a laptop.

In that context it worked very well. I never had to take my hands off the keyboard to start apps or even find files, as I said above the HUD is amazing. If I could get the Unity HUD on gnome2 (or maybe KDE, but as pretty as KDE is I've always found it slightly confusing to use), that would be the best of all worlds, but such a thing doesn't exist as far as I know.

Unity does make some perplexing decisions that seem to make things worse for no reason which is probably what gets people going, but it's also added a lot of useful ways to do things.

Mess for the long-term Linux geek. The few Joe SixPacks who give Ubuntu a whirl will simply accept it as they did the varying Windows desktops and play within the environment.

For Linux to make mindshare & marketshare among those not inclined to hand-cruft config files it needs shiny baubles like Unity to lure the Windows users while retaining the ability for geeks to substitute in KDE and ditch the whole messy bits.

Captain Ned wrote:The few Joe SixPacks who give Ubuntu a whirl will simply accept it as they did the varying Windows desktops and play within the environment.

And then they're going to dich it completely because Unity is unusable for productivity work. It's yet another tablet interface for 30" screens.

MacOS close/maximize/minimize buttons are also unconfigurable anymore (unless you like the whole mess when they're torn off half screen away and centered somewhere in the menu bar and appear only on hover, and act differently for different apps). HUD helps a little, but it's not even close to fixing anything.

When will Linux Unity developers understand that they can only lure away Windows users, to break that damn 1% Linux marketshare that makes sure no games and apps are ever ported to Linux? They're not going to make new users from nowhere, they can only lure them away.

Mint has everything right, search in start menu, categories, Win like interface, and works out of the box. I only miss Win7 application pinning to taskbar.

Madman wrote:And then they're going to dich it completely because Unity is unusable for productivity work. It's yet another tablet interface for 30" screens.

And like most Linux evangelists you miss the point. Joe SixPack will never customize anything. He will work with what appeared at first boot. He will not go CLI and will only modify settings with a mouse. Cater to that user, allow some way for his games to come over, fix OO so that it's somehow 100% Office 2010 compatible, and you'll get converts.

Make the conversion from Windows to Linux transparent to Joe Average User and the take rate of Linux will rise. What's left to be seen is if the Linux community is willing to "dumb down" (in their minds) the UI to attract the average office drone user of Windows. Someone must, by now, have coded a distro that speaks to this goal.

I'm not a Linux evangelist, I've been working with Microsoft software from DOS era, and I'm only starting to migrate to Linux lately, because I can't stand Windows8. And I noticed that Linux is less painfull to set up and use than Windows. I've been working with Linux maybe only 2 years total, and I still find areas where it's lacking.

I would turn into Linux evangelist if I could use Visual Studio level software on Linux, launch all AAA titles, have camcoder and digital camera software and have a clean Windows like UI.

Currently, Linux Mint is pretty close, and since it's free, and works so smooth 98% of time, I like the choice, and I'm vocally advertising the distro which, IMHO, is the closest to eating away from Windows as a defacto OS for everyday user. Not because it's better than Windows, but because I want it to succeed. I want more competition and more choice. Ubuntu 10.04LTS was the previous distro that I felt was on the right track, but they, IMHO, did everything wrong with 11.xx, 12.xx.

I don't see any reason to choose between Ubuntu or Mint. Just install them both and see which works best for you, it's not like you have to buy them and both will install in 5GB of hard drive space (though I wouldn't want to use less than 15-20GB).

And like most Linux evangelists you miss the point. Joe SixPack will never customize anything

Personally I've always felt that customising the desktop is greatly overrated. I alway sigh when I have to sit at someone else's PC and find they've moved everything and changed all their system fonts / colours etc. Maybe it's just the places where I work but usually when I see this it doesn't mean I'm looking at a highly productive user who is looking to find ways to work better. Usually it seem to be an effort to look busy without actually doing any work, either that or they did it by accident and don't know how to change it back

I'd suggest Mageia, being it's pretty user friendly, and has a gui interface for almost everything. I don't really want to mess with Ubuntu after hearing all the negative news, and that it updates slower than the rest. Mint or Fedora would be my second choices.

I do want to learn CLI. I was told by my friends to read some books before I delved in to it though. I am a newbee to the PC realm and my knowledge is limited to me just having Windows all my life. When I was a kid I used to screw around in dos before windows 95 came out, but it has been far too long. I will not be doing school work on this or any type of office work, at least not until next spring and I hope to have somewhat of a better build by then. I use Firefox mostly for Nova-PBS programs and the news. I will not be playing anything other than homeworld 1 and 2, Sim City 4 Deluxe or Command and Conquer the first decade if anything. I basically need this dinosaur to hold me over for a few months until my next build. I am completely new to CLI but not afraid of it, just of me screwing something up. Thank you all for your input-Linux does not seem as bad as my friends made it out to be.

RAMBO wrote:I do want to learn CLI. I was told by my friends to read some books before I delved in to it though. I am a newbee to the PC realm and my knowledge is limited to me just having Windows all my life. When I was a kid I used to screw around in dos before windows 95 came out, but it has been far too long. I will not be doing school work on this or any type of office work, at least not until next spring and I hope to have somewhat of a better build by then. I use Firefox mostly for Nova-PBS programs and the news. I will not be playing anything other than homeworld 1 and 2, Sim City 4 Deluxe or Command and Conquer the first decade if anything. I basically need this dinosaur to hold me over for a few months until my next build. I am completely new to CLI but not afraid of it, just of me screwing something up. Thank you all for your input-Linux does not seem as bad as my friends made it out to be.

CLI is not some sort of a magic bullet or something. It's handy for some tasks, but it's not a do it all environment.

I am mostly using GUI, unless I need to do some specific tasks, and for those, CLI in Linux is super awesome, million times better than in Windows.

What I recommend, is to start from good GUI, Mint or Mageia or Kubuntu, and just start using it. Soon enough CLI will creep up at some places, like when you want to copy files effectively, or install some packages, change password. You'll learn that some things are just 1000x faster with "alt+ctrl+t, ctrl+r, type few letters, enter"

EDIT: I just checked the "history" in the terminal of my Mint installation. Over a few months, there are only 5 entries, which I used to check smart data. This is a sign that the distribution is Avarage Joe friendly. Everything works out of the box.

Madman wrote:CLI is not some sort of a magic bullet or something. It's handy for some tasks, but it's not a do it all environment.

I am mostly using GUI, unless I need to do some specific tasks, and for those, CLI in Linux is super awesome, million times better than in Windows.

What I recommend, is to start from good GUI, Mint or Mageia or Kubuntu, and just start using it. Soon enough CLI will creep up at some places, like when you want to copy files effectively, or install some packages, change password. You'll learn that some things are just 1000x faster with "alt+ctrl+t, ctrl+r, type few letters, enter"

Great, I will start with Mint and try all the others you guys have suggested and see how it goes with this old build.

Madman wrote:CLI is not some sort of a magic bullet or something. It's handy for some tasks, but it's not a do it all environment.

I am mostly using GUI, unless I need to do some specific tasks, and for those, CLI in Linux is super awesome, million times better than in Windows.

What I recommend, is to start from good GUI, Mint or Mageia or Kubuntu, and just start using it. Soon enough CLI will creep up at some places, like when you want to copy files effectively, or install some packages, change password. You'll learn that some things are just 1000x faster with "alt+ctrl+t, ctrl+r, type few letters, enter"

Great, I will start with Mint and try all the others you guys have suggested and see how it goes with this old build.

Use a DVD+RW, as most of distros run from live DVD. Download, burn, boot from DVD, play for a few hours, repeat.

The performace running from live DVD will be a lot worse than actuall install though.

EDIT: For Mint, there are two desktop flavors, Mate and Cinnamon, I'm running Mate, but Cinnamon is supposedly more modern. Haven't tried it, I guess I will have to try a live DVD too.

Having reviewed your specs and requirements, I heavily suggest sticking to Windows XP as your primary OS. You can dual boot into Linux to play around with the distros, but both Wine and gaming in VMware will run terribly slow with that video card. If you have any intention of running Windows games under Linux with that configuration, I would kindly suggest that you delay those intentions as you'll likely disappoint yourself so bad you'll never touch Linux again. Instead, dual-booting Linux or installing VMware and assigning 512MB/1GB ram to the VM will likely result in a more positive experience.

Once you get a beefier system, if you want to make the jump to Linux and wish to take your Windows applications with you, especially as an entirely new Linux user, I recommend doing it using VMware and not Wine. You can download VMware Player for free and install a Windows XP installation within it and play your games. Playing games like Homeworld and SimCity 4 will be walk in the park even for VMware for any modern video card. The stability of the games within the virtual machine will heavily depend on the drivers you use. AMD's and Nvidia's proprietary drivers will be sufficient. (You'll lose Kernel Mode Setting, but I don't think you'll care much given that you want to game at all)

Once you've become familiar with the rest of the Linux operating system, you can start playing with Wine. But just be realistic in your expectations. Assume that things will work 20% of the time, requiring 3x the amount of configuration effort you expect, and once you get it to run, expect it to function half-normally. With those expectations, you just might be satisfied with the outcome. And that's not a jab at the Wine project at all, but more of a recognition that what they are trying to do is extremely difficult.

Ideally though, given your system specs, you being new to Linux, and your desire to play games, my recommendation is: Stick with Windows XP as the native OS, grab a copy of VMware Player or Virtualbox, and install Linux distros using that. That way, if you hate the distro, it's as easy as dragging the VM directory into the trashcan and creating a new one. And further, you'll still get to play your games.

Last edited by bjm on Thu Aug 02, 2012 12:33 am, edited 1 time in total.

Madman wrote:CLI is not some sort of a magic bullet or something. It's handy for some tasks, but it's not a do it all environment.

I am mostly using GUI, unless I need to do some specific tasks, and for those, CLI in Linux is super awesome, million times better than in Windows.

What I recommend, is to start from good GUI, Mint or Mageia or Kubuntu, and just start using it. Soon enough CLI will creep up at some places, like when you want to copy files effectively, or install some packages, change password. You'll learn that some things are just 1000x faster with "alt+ctrl+t, ctrl+r, type few letters, enter"

Great, I will start with Mint and try all the others you guys have suggested and see how it goes with this old build.

Use a DVD+RW, as most of distros run from live DVD. Download, burn, boot from DVD, play for a few hours, repeat.

The performace running from live DVD will be a lot worse than actuall install though.

EDIT: For Mint, there are two desktop flavors, Mate and Cinnamon, I'm running Mate, but Cinnamon is supposedly more modern. Haven't tried it, I guess I will have to try a live DVD too.

Just tried Mint/Mate on live cd, going to try Ubuntu, its variations and cinnamon later. I like Mints set up more than windows, its easier to find certain things. Could not md5 the cd for some reason. Thinking of just going ahead with the install and wiping out windows. I followed the steps but I think I can just do it easier from Mint later on.

l33t-g4m3r wrote:I'd suggest Mageia, being it's pretty user friendly, and has a gui interface for almost everything. I don't really want to mess with Ubuntu after hearing all the negative news, and that it updates slower than the rest. Mint or Fedora would be my second choices.

Aside from a default packages contained on the ISO and pre-configuration, Mint *IS* Ubuntu. The update infrastructure, packaging system and main repos, drivers/kernels, userspace software stack; Mint is the same as Ubuntu. That's not to take away anything from Mint though, the work they are doing is awesome. I definitely recommend it over Ubuntu, but I think it's still important to recognize Ubuntu's contribution as well. Once you've installed Mint, it's really Ubuntu that is maintaining your software after that point.

As for Fedora, I'd be careful recommending that to new users. Even though it's my preferred distro (along with Slackware), it's not exactly friendly to new Linux users unless they want to dive into self-configuration stuff. It doesn't come installed with any proprietary drivers nor are they easily obtained. You can add the relevant repos (i.e. RPMFusion and the like) to get the compiled graphics drivers, but Fedora updates it's kernel often enough that those repos will be left behind. You'll either have to wait for those repos to update the modules and remember not to update your kernel or compile them yourself. Otherwise, you'll find yourself not booting into X.

Having reviewed your specs and requirements, I heavily suggest sticking to Windows XP as your primary OS. You can dual boot into Linux to play around with the distros, but both Wine and gaming in VMware will run terribly slow with that video card. If you have any intention of running Windows games under Linux with that configuration, I would kindly suggest that you delay those intentions as you'll likely disappoint yourself so bad you'll never touch Linux again. Instead, dual-booting Linux or installing VMware and assigning 512MB/1GB ram to the VM will likely result in a more positive experience.

Once you get a beefier system, if you want to make the jump to Linux and wish to take your Windows applications with you, especially as an entirely new Linux user, I recommend doing it using VMware and not Wine. You can download VMware Player for free and install a Windows XP installation within it and play your games. Playing games like Homeworld and SimCity 4 will be walk in the park even for VMware for any modern video card. The stability of the games within the virtual machine will heavily depend on the drivers you use. AMD's and Nvidia's proprietary drivers will be sufficient. (You'll lose Kernel Mode Setting, but I don't think you'll care much given that you want to game at all)

Once you've become familiar with the rest of the Linux operating system, you can start playing with Wine. But just be realistic in your expectations. Assume that things will work 20% of the time, requiring 3x the amount of configuration effort you expect, and once you get it to run, expect it to function half-normally. With those expectations, you just might be satisfied with the outcome. And that's not a jab at the Wine project at all, but more of a recognition that what they are trying to do is extremely difficult.

Ideally though, given your system specs, you being new to Linux, and your desire to play games, my recommendation is: Stick with Windows XP as the native OS, grab a copy of VMware Player or Virtualbox, and install Linux distros using that. That way, if you hate the distro, it's as easy as dragging the VM directory into the trashcan and creating a new one. And further, you'll still get to play your games.

I was using a livecd to run Mint so I did not get to take full control of the system as I would have in a full install. I will try your idea since I do not lose my install and I can switch the OS if I feel its not working for me. Thanks for the heads up on my graphics card. I knew it was old but I also forgot about how low my ram was.

Aside from a default packages contained on the ISO and pre-configuration, Mint *IS* Ubuntu. The update infrastructure, packaging system and main repos, drivers/kernels, userspace software stack; Mint is the same as Ubuntu.

According to the Linux Mint website, the distribution is based on Ubuntu and Debian. And the Ubuntu distribution would not be here if it weren't thanks to Debian. Besides that I've read a lot of positive things about Linux Mint myself, and their website really shines in comparison to the old Debian website, as it could attract more users just looking at the website itself.